


Waiting For Some Words to Jump at Me

by APgeeksout



Series: French Navy [2]
Category: Fringe, Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-09
Updated: 2011-10-09
Packaged: 2017-10-24 10:57:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/262700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/pseuds/APgeeksout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Just so I’m clear: we’re just strolling into a meeting with the FBI?  And nothing about this plan concerns you?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting For Some Words to Jump at Me

**Author's Note:**

> Fringe/SPN crossover, set late in S1 of _Fringe_ , and sometime post _SPN_ 6.06
> 
> Sequel/Companion to "[I'll Be Criticized For Lending Out My Eye](http://community.livejournal.com/sometimes_twice/6327.html)", and touched off by a lovely comment thereon from [](http://maychorian.livejournal.com/profile)[**maychorian**](http://maychorian.livejournal.com/)
> 
> ~3000 words
> 
> Title snagged from Camera Obscura's "French Navy"

“Just so I’m clear: we’re just strolling into a meeting with the FBI? And nothing about this plan concerns you?” Sam asks, curious but not anxious. Nothing makes his brother nervous anymore.

It’s such a _Sam_ kind of question - worrying whether they might be connected to those thoroughly dangerous men, Sam and Dean Winchester - even with his tone so wrong, that Dean’s throat tightens around his answer. Can’t even trust his own fucking voice these days.

He pauses at the bottom of the stairs, letting Sam catch up, glancing down the gloomy basement corridor, waiting until his voice steadies enough that this Sam won’t hear anything off in it. “Bobby vouched for them. I guess this particular Fed is pretty good at knowing when she’s neck deep in a job that should probably be ours.”

He finds what he hopes is the right door and knocks like he’s got official business there.

Quick footsteps approach, and the door opens to reveal a woman whose dark suit, no-nonsense ponytail, and appraising glance mark her as government as surely as his own tattered jeans and the unruly hair curling up at Sam’s collar must identify them as anything but.

“Agent Dunham?”

She nods. “And you are?”

“Dean Malone, and this is my brother Sam. Bobby Singer asked us to drop by,” he says, holding out one of the Singer Auto Salvage business cards that have gotten him out of deep shit more than a few times.

She looks at the card, then back at each of their faces, and finally opens the door wide enough to admit them.

A few steps behind Dunham stands a guy she introduces as Peter Bishop. Dean guesses him to be roughly his own age - which he’s spent every minute since he woke up under Sam’s tireless stare reminding himself is thirty-one and not a-hundred-and-five - and notes how he’s positioned himself between the entrance and the greying man with the cardigan and the kindly smile. Protective, sizing them up, even though he doesn’t seem to second-guess Dunham’s approval.

“Sam Malone?” Peter asks, dubious but light. No challenge there unless they ask for it. Dunham could do worse for backup. Dean remembers how that felt. Knows it’d be easier if he didn’t.

“Yes. And believe me, he’s heard all the jokes,” Dean cuts in, answering before Sam, who’s gone fucking tone-deaf without his soul, can turn harmless small talk into something sharper.

He takes in the rest of the room, which looks like the set of a Vincent Price movie after Martha Stewart’s tried to spruce the place up a little. There are tables and counters and huge corroded bits of machinery, all covered as well as possible with drop-cloths. The bits that must’ve been too sensitive to cover - a set of petri dishes growing something fuzzy in colors Crayola would’ve been proud to recreate, a delicate tracery of wires, glowing faintly and running into a terrarium that occasionally rocks violently beneath it’s own concealing drape - make him faintly glad he can’t see the rest. In his periphery, he catches Sam, still and always a nerd, looking around like he’s trying to bust out with some x-ray vision - and, hell, for all Dean knows about him anymore, maybe that’s something else he’s capable of now.

There’s also a cow. Just _there_. Munching on some clover, brown eyes taking them in placidly.

“That’s Gene,” Dunham says, smiling a little as she re-captures his attention, directs it back to the older man standing behind the least-cluttered of the lab tables, where she and Peter have joined him. “And this is Doctor Walter Bishop. His findings are what lead me to believe that Mr. Singer’s network might be better equipped to deal with this particular case than my own.”

“I remember Bobby Singer,” Dr. Bishop says, sounding pleased with the memory, or maybe with himself, “He lives in that delightful museum! Such delicious grilled cheese sandwiches he made.” Something in his expression, turning curious and eager and assessing at the mention of their mutual friend, confirms Dean’s guess that the Bishops are father and son.

Dunham and Peter trade quick smiles at the pronouncements, then turn to monitor his reaction and Sam’s. Even under their scrutiny, Dean catches himself smiling at the idea of Bobby’s as a museum, of himself and Sammy hiding out there, like the kids in that book - Basil A. Frankenheimer or something - that Sam had insisted on reading, loudly, from the backseat as they drove away from Lincoln, Nebraska and the third-grade teacher he’d fallen deeply in eight year-old love with. Back when Sam was still whole enough to love anyone or to insist on anything.

Today’s Sam surprises him by mustering up a smile of his own and putting a fair impression of warmth in his voice when he answers the older Bishop. “And Bobby remembered you.” He produces a small, tabbed rectangle of paper from an inner pocket of his jacket and extends it to Dr. Bishop. “He sends his best wishes and his blueberry muffin recipe.”

Dr. Bishop takes the paper - which Dean now realizes is an actual recipe card, something he’s pretty much obligated to give Bobby shit about the next time they’re together - and handling it almost reverently, tucks it into the pocket of his sweater. “Thank you, dear boy. Tell him I’ll guard the secret as though it were my own.”

Relaying Bobby’s message seems to have exhausted Sam’s supply of simulated human responses for the day, so there’s an awkward pause when he shifts from friendly to all business, “So, what is it that needs our attention?”

Dunham reacts first, pushing a Manila envelope.across the table to them. “Abraham Bethune, a bookkeeper from Providence, bled to death in his apartment last week. We were called because of some unusual developments during the investigation.”

She pauses while he empties the envelope and fans through the photos inside. There’s a desk, smothered by piles and sheets and scraps of paper, all covered with heavy calligraphy or hieroglyphics or maybe just scribbles. The section of pale yellow wallpaper visible in the background is similarly marked from the baseboards up to an undefined limit a few feet below the ceiling - the furthest reach of a man of average height, he realizes, looking at the shots of the room from other angles, noting how the ink staining the gouged symbols changes from a runny black to a crusty brownish as the frantic scribbles spread across the doorjamb and into another room. It’s a color he knows more intimately than he’ll ever be comfortable with again, and he stops to hear another piece of Dunham’s account before he looks at what’s on the other side of the blood-smeared doorway.

“Bethune was playing Edgar Allan Poe in a community theater production, and apparently he decided to be Method about it,” Peter says, lifting the hinged lid of the scuffed wooden box that sits on the table before him. “He borrowed this from the prop trunk, and started copying down “The Raven”.”

“This” turns out to be a writing quill made from a broad, charcoal colored feather, sharp metal nib either tarnished or stained to the same darkness.

“Near the end of his third page, he stopped writing in English,” Dunham continues. “And when the inkwell ran dry...”

“He opened up a vein. Or several.” Sam finishes for her, taking the rest of the photos and flipping through them with a professional detachment that Dean wishes he could still believe was just for show.

“It seems to have taken hours,” Agent Dunham says quietly, breaking her gaze away from Bethune’s gory dining room. “At first, the theory was a simple nervous breakdown. We were called when a tech in the Providence crime lab tried to write with the quill, sliced into her own arm, and picked up writing where Bethune left off.” She indicates another stack of photos, this one with the markings laboriously scratched into a stained countertop, pouring into the bowl of a deep industrial sink. “She’s currently catatonic. No one associated with the theater group remembers how they came to have that particular prop.”

“It’s truly a remarkable specimen,” Dr. Bishop says, apparently no more disturbed by the rest of the case than Robo-Sam. “I’ve examined it by every method I could manage without Peter’s interference -”

“Walter, you’re not writing with the killer fountain pen, and I’m not saying it again.” Peter interrupts.

“You’ve said that very thing several times already today. My memory isn’t so porous that I haven’t noticed how repetitive you’ve become, boy.”

Dunham touches Dr. Bishop’s sleeve and gently refocuses the conversation before they have an angry mad scientist on their hands. “Walter, why don’t you tell the Malones what you were able to discover?”

“Certainly. The feather is definitely organic material, but it comes from no known species, nor from any of those I dealt with in my youth. The writing tip is metallic, but its composition doesn’t match any substance found on this planet or its surroundings.” He gazes wistfully into the box, where it rests on the faded velvet lining, looking hamless, as he continues. “I had a pet theory concerning its origins, but it doesn’t emit the radiation signature characteristic of objects from that -”

Dunham and Peter simultaneously break into coughing fits.

“- other place,” Dr. Bishop finishes, smiling serenely at his son and the Agent in turn.

“The writing,” Sam begins, peering at the images of Bethune’s last message to the world, “do we know what it says?”

“We’re still waiting on a translation,” Dunham says. “It’s been hard to assemble a qualified team, but Homeland’s analysts are pretty confident that the language is Enochian. Nothing Bethune or the lab tech would ever have had the opportunity to learn.”

“I was afraid of that,” Dean says, turning away from the others, feeling the fresh weight of his suspicion drag his shoulders into a slump. How did he give up his family and his future and every damn thing that was asked of him and still end up with a world where Sam has all the heart of a pocket calculator and heaven drops by to fuck life up for innocent people whenever things get too dull upstairs?

“I suppose it would be of little comfort to suggest that there has always been a plan, even when none among us perceive it.”

Even if he hadn’t recognized the voice, didn’t feel the presence in the sudden tightness in his chest and the charge that prickles over his skin, he’d know from the indrawn breaths, the flustered shifting and shuffling of the people on the other side of the table, that Cas has arrived, silently insinuating himself into the corner next to the cow enclosure. Gene lows once before returning to her lunch.

“You suppose right.” Figures that after all this time, the angel on his shoulder hears what’s the fucking point? as the only prayer worth answering. He addresses the Bishops and Dunham - who’s edged to the front of their little group, primed to draw and use her service weapon if Cas gives her a reason. “Castiel is... an associate of ours. Bobby will clear him, too, if that’ll help. He consults on this kind of case with us pretty often.”

Dunham relaxes, not completely, but enough that she doesn’t aerate Cas’s trenchcoat as he steps closer to the table. Meanwhile, Dr. Bishop produces from one of his pockets a gizmo that Dean is pretty sure he recognizes from hours of late-night sci-fi as a Geiger counter, and approaches Cas with it, trying unsuccessfully to sidestep Peter’s restraining grasp.

“That’s the most efficient teleportation I’ve ever seen! No harmful residual radiation, or at least undetectable quantities. Might I examine your equipment?”

Cas throws him a helpless glance - looking for a definition of “equipment” that he can place in this context, a response that won’t unbalance the already on-edge humans in the room. If Dean had it in him to laugh about anything today, that expression would do it.

“Maybe later you can badger our guest about how he got here, Walter. For now, let’s just deal with the quill,” Peter steps in, sparing Cas the trouble of answering even as he eyeballs him intently. “One creepy mystery at a time.”

“What can you tell us about this?” Sam asks, pushing the open box across the tabletop toward Cas. The question brushes aside the awkwardness and tension so smoothly that Dean might have admired it once. Before he knew that his brother isn’t actually expertly defusing the mood of the room; he’s just untouched by it. Like everything else these days. Even the shudder Dean can never suppress if he spends too much time with this Sam, thinking about all this shit too hard.

“Penemue,” Cas says, decisive and regretful.

“Gesundheit,” Peter says, drawing a look from Dunham that Dean thinks she probably intends to be more disapproving than it comes off.

“It’s not a weapon, exactly,” Cas continues, unfazed. Dean figures he’s used to ignoring a running commentary by now - if Bishop hadn’t gotten there first, the cheesy joke would’ve been his line.

“But, it is the present manifestation in your realm of Penemue’s gift to mankind, the knowledge of reading and writing, recording its secrets and deeds and truths. Few humans are capable of channeling its undiluted wisdom and power without being consumed by it.”

“So you’re saying this is an angel feather quill and one of your rebellious brothers and sisters ditched it in Rhode Island to see what an interesting mess it would make?” he asks, hoping that Bobby’s word is enough to keep Dunham’s team on their side even after they hear this conversation.

“Or to distract us from the search for more dangerous items. Objects removed from the armory in the disarray of battle and never returned.”

“More dangerous. Awesome.” He’s pretty fucking tired of angels using the world as a petri dish or a sandbox or a litter pan. At least Hell is fighting most of its civil war on its own goddamn turf.

“Wait. What?” Peter says, eyes tracking suspiciously between Cas and the box and Dean and Sam.

“Let us say that my father also creates strange and wondrous and sometimes troublesome things, and leave it at that,” Cas says with a gentle smile that Dean knows he would find unnerving in Peter’s shoes.

“So, can you keep this locked down, or do we need to handle it?” Sam asks Cas, still oblivious to their hosts’ uneasiness.

“Our forces have regrouped. It will not find its way back among you.” Cas’s tone is chilly. Clearly Dean’s not alone in wearing on the patience of heaven.

Dunham has been quiet and watchful since the angel’s appearance - cool and competent to the bone; no wonder Bobby’s decided they can trust her. Dean addresses her directly now, “We can take this someplace secure, keep it from affecting anyone else. How big a problem is it going to cause for you if your evidence disappears?”

“It won’t go unnoticed,” she admits, “but, unusual occurrences are kind of a feature of the assignments this division handles.”

“And stranger things have definitely happened on our watch,” Peter says, giving her a raised eyebrow and a smile. They seem a little steadier, remembering their own set of disturbing insider info.

“You may tell them that I’ve misplaced it during my analysis, Olivia,” Dr. Bishop adds. “I’ve simply forgotten where I filed it; surely it will turn up later, during an unrelated investigation.”

“Thank you, Walter.”

“Think nothing of it,” he says brightly, looking reverently into the box once more. “Perhaps I’ll come to believe it myself, and not be so aggrieved to have missed the chance to study it as deeply as I’d have liked.”

“Okay, so, that’s settled,” Dean announces quickly, breaking in before oh-so-logical Sam can alienate them with the wrong observation, “Cas, if you’ll do the honors, I’ll walk you to the door.”

“Yes. I should be getting back.” Cas says, acknowledging Dunham and the Bishops with a courteous nod. He lifts the quill from the velvet lining and tucks it into an interior pocket of his trenchcoat.

They walk together to the lab entrance, and Dean notices, whether he wants to or not, how easily they fall into a matching stride. Bodies adjusting to meet one another no matter how little contact they’re keeping lately. He stops at the doorway while Cas moves out into the hall.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have appeared in such a crowded room without warning,” Cas offers wryly.

“Not your most inconspicuous moment,” he agrees, turning halfway to look back into the lab, where Dr. Bishop is saying something that makes his son shake his head, exasperated but grinning, too. Dunham’s answering laughter carries throughout the lab, a sound that’s warmer than he’d have guessed. “But I think they’ll manage.”

“I have made inquiries into the fate of your brother’s soul,” Cas says. “I have no news, but we will find a way to restore him. “ A hand settles hesitantly at the back of his neck, familiar palm warm against the skin above his collar. “Have faith.”

“Sure, I’ll get right on that,” he scoffs, watching Sam pore over the crime scene photos, immune to the relief and nervous energy and good cheer rolling off of Dunham’s team just across the table. He ignores the fingers that curl against his neck in a too-gentle squeeze and the way his throat wants to close up on him again.

He stays in the doorway and keeps watching, while even the echo of the warmth of another body at his side steadily fades. Eventually, Dunham realizes that they’re not on their way yet and moves to see them out, offering her card and her thanks - the message a tactful, inarguable we have work to do, please leave. Until the moment she starts ushering him out of the lab, Sam never looks up from the file. Not even for a heartbeat.


End file.
